I Saw This Tutorial Years Ago, It's Invaluable. Seriously You Guys.

Here we have two of Syzygys pals from way back in the war: Cerbearursus, the three headed Grizzly, and Russel, the black bull, who is not black in this image because inking and rendering digitally would be way too much work... there’s a story behind Russles name, which I may tell at some point or another. We’ll see. I’m pretty sure I could do a whole webcomic of just these guys and Syz sitting together around a campfire telling war stories.

Funfact; I scribbled each of these guys in like five/ten minutes apiece, if that, and have never been able to draw either of them ever again. I didn’t even have refs for bulls or bears at the time (and it shows). Sometimes, magic just sort of happens, all by itself,  somewhere between the page and the pencil, and you spend the rest of your life trying to recapture it. They’re far from flawless, but even so, I dunno... I just like how they came out.

These pics are particularly messy: construction lines all over the place... you can still see most of the box I used to block in Cerbear. See why I don’t normally post my pencil drawings?

Up here in Canada, despite being more influenced by european standards than US, (French bilingual, the metric system, english spelling in most cases, etc), the V for victory gesture is not considered rude (with either the back of the hand or the palm front). We use index and middle finger when gesturing “two,” Though gesturing with the middle finger is still considered quite rude.

Bilingual mishaps are always fun:

I was at a restaurant once, and a patron was asking a waitress about “more de-sheys...” The english speaking waitress thought she was asking about menu options, dishes, but in French, “des chaise” means “the chairs,” ...she was asking for more seats, because there were going to be more people showing up, and “more” was the only english word in the phrase that she knew.

As for pleasantries: a brief “hello” is usually standard when addressing a cashier, and if it isn’t busy, I’ll trade some brief small talk too.

On a similar vein, Canadians definitely will apologize when someone bumps into them, rather than the other way around. The reason being, if someone bumps into me, I must have been in their way.

Natalie Portman being confused by the fact that you have to say “hi” to someone before starting a conversation in France got me like ?????

This little guy is a carbuncle: a lizard about five inches long when he’s not all curled up. He has a gemstone inside his head that, if extracted and correctly processed can be used to create a potion that grants the imbiber... I dunno, eternal life, or the ability to perceive the essential nature of reality, or something like that. Removing the gem kills the carbuncle, so this one is having a little quiet time sitting on his own belly, ‘cuz poachers got most of his family.

Wow: this one looked so much better as a pencil sketch than it does on screen. Especially that hind leg, jeez.

Mod pic! Because reasons.

People don't really seem to believe me when I say that I usually look like a total psycho... you be the judge.

I'm not in a bad mood or anything here... this is just my typical "game face" whenever I'm drawing. I'm not kidding: I spend eight hours a day staring at my sketchbook like this... small wonder I get eyestrain so often.

Quick little study of my hand, 5-10 mins. Hands seem to put most artists on guard, but I love drawing 'em. Well, maybe more of a love-hate thing. I wasted half my time in high-school drawing my left hand.

Sweet Celestia in a bucket... when I sketch, I just fling lead everywhere, don't I? Tho, some of that is actually hair on my knuckles. I'm kinda scruffy.

Does that mean this counts as furry art? Guh.

Hey, look. I drew some keywork 'cuz I was bored. Then I inked it, really really badly.

True story.

I might do more of these, they're good practice. Straight lines aren't exactly my strong point.

On paper, this is 12 cm across... just under five inches. I really should be able to manage one about half as big, we'll see how that turns out.

Some interesting background trivia regarding Princes Taco:

Originally she was going to be a Queen, but Hasbro intervened because Disney had established the trend that Queens were evil and Princesses were good.

Loren Faust came up with the premise for Princess Taco's debut episode, but most of the script and character design was handled by the rest of the crew, since Loren had left the team at that point. She was surprised to see Taco appear as an alicorn when the episode aired, as her original concept was for a unicorn.

Prince Fajita was originally going to be Prince Burrito, but Hasbro had lost the copyrights for the original G1 character. Loren combined the appearance of G1 Burrito and the name of G2 Fajita. Also, he was originally going to be Duke Fajita, but again, Hasbro intervened because Duke sounded evil.

When asked where Princess Taco was during The The Best Night Ever, the writers said that they hadn't even considered giving her and appearance, and she never even came up during production. Fans raged, but Taco's episode in Season 2 was very well received.

Taco's dress appears several times on a rack in the background of Rarity's shop, and is frequently reused as a set piece or prop. However, the taco is in fact her cutie mark, and is so large it just looks like an item of clothing.

True story.

two images for the new tumblr I’m drawing for, AskprincessTaco . I don’t know why I do these things to myself.

During my stream I drew that second picture and somehow that started the legacy of Princess Taco. PrinceShootingStar made the tumblr when I mentioned that I totally would if I didn’t, you know, have two ask blogs and an art blog already. So now I’m drawing somestuff for him and AskPrincessTaco. :P

(Also thanks to Whitefox for all of the amusing hasbro quips during the stream)

Computers Warping My Brain Again

I'm sure everyone has had one of those moments where they did some sort of mistake in real life, and thought "Ctrl-Z!" to no avail.

I was inking something, thought "Where did I put my hawk-quill nib?" and instinctively reached for Google Search.

I'm pretty sure there's just no hope for me anymore.

*’m L*lling at this harder than * really should be.

*IoI. X3

if you c*nsor anything in a post you are l*gally required to put all of the omitted v*wels at the end as a footn*te

*eeoo

Finally, at long last: I have a name for my style of work: Tradigital... Woo! Time to go re-tag everything I’ve ever posted. Fun story: I was thinking about how to categorize my work, and I thought, It’s kinda part traditional, part digital... tradigital! And I thought, I wonder if I’m the first one to think of that. So off to Google I go, and it turns out, I wasn’t! And I went, “Cool: now I have a name for it!

Also picked up a new term a little while ago: “Spotting blacks,” which is where you fill in solid black areas of a comic frame... funny that in the myriad of comic how too books I own, it wasn’t mentioned once. Good thing to know, since spotting blacks is the part that I do digitally.